Zusya on the Roof

Heels dug into the tar paper, twenty-three floors above the street, cradling his newborn grandson—how did he wind up here? It was not a simple thing, as his father would say. Simplicity was not his patrimony.

To begin specifically: Brodman had been dead for two weeks, but then, sadly, he had come back to this world, where he’d spent fifty years trying to write unnecessary books. There had been complications after surgery for a tumor in his bowel. Hooked to a respirator, bags for every fluid going in or coming out, for fifteen days his body lay on a gurney fighting a medieval war against double pneumonia. For two weeks Brodman hung in the balance, dead and not dead. Like the house in Leviticus, he had been infested with plague: they scraped him clean and took him apart, stone by stone. Either it would work or it wouldn’t. Either the plague would be gone or it had already spread through him.

While waiting for the verdict, he dreamed wildly. Such hallucinations! Drugged, his temperature soaring, he dreamed he was the anti-Herzl, lecturing from coast to coast to crowds so huge they watched simulcasts of the simulcasts. The West Bank rabbi issued a fatwa on his head, with a ten-million-dollar bounty funded by a Jewish casino king. Hunted for treason, Brodman was hidden in a safe house somewhere in the heart of Germany. Outside his window, he could see the rolling hills of—Bavaria? Weserbergland? He was spared the details for his own good, in case he should break down and place a phone call to his wife, Mira, or his lawyer, or Rabbi Chanan Ben-Zvi of Gush Etzion. And if he did call the rabbi what would he say? I surrender, come and get me, third dirt road on the left, past the dairy farm where Brunhilde is singing “Edelweiss” at the udders, and don’t forget your assault rifle? Or maybe the rabbi planned to slit Brodman’s throat with a carving knife.

From the German safe house, he held counsel with Buber, Rabbi Akiva, and Gershom Scholem, who relaxed on a bearskin rug, scratching behind its ears. He sat with Maimonides in the back of a bulletproof car; there was no end to the talking. He saw Moses Ibn Ezra and heard Salo Baron, to whom he called, waving his arms to disperse the smoke. He couldn’t see him, but knew he was in that swirling nebula, breathing heavily—Salo Wittmayer Baron, who knew twenty languages and had testified at Eichmann’s trial, the first man to receive a chair in Jewish History at a university in the Western world. Salo, what have you brought on us?

Enormous things happened to him during those feverish weeks, unspeakable revelations. Unbuttoned from time, transient and transcendental, Brodman saw the true shape of his life, how it had torqued always in the direction of duty. Not only his life but the life of his people—the three thousand years of treacherous remembering, highly regarded suffering, and waiting.

On the fifteenth day, his fever broke and he woke up to find himself cured. His body was habitable; he would live a little more. All that remained, according to the passage in Leviticus, was the ritual atonement that called for two birds, one to be sacrificed and the other left to live. One killed, the other dipped in the blood of its kin, shaken seven times around the house, then set free. Such reprieve! He never read the passage without crying. But he shall let go the living bird out of the city into the open fields, and make atonement for the house: and it shall be clean.

While he was hallucinating, his only grandchild had arrived into the world. In his weakened state, Brodman half believed that his own mental work had performed the labor. His younger daughter, Ruthie, didn’t like men. When she’d announced that she was pregnant at forty-one, Brodman had accepted it as a miracle of immaculate conception. But the happiness had been short-lived. A few months later, he’d gone in for a routine blood test, which led to a colonoscopy, which led, a month and a half before the child was due, to the discovery of his own gestation. If he believed in such things, he might have taken it for something mystical. Sweating and moaning, in horrific pain from his gut, he had pushed the idea of the child through the tight passage of incredulity and borne him into existence. It had almost killed him. No, it had killed him. He had died for the child, and then, by some miracle, he had been brought back again. For what?

They removed the respirator early one morning. The young doctor stood over him, eyes moist from the miracle he’d performed. Brodman inhaled his first breath of real air in two weeks, and it went to his head. Dizzy, he pulled the doctor close, so close that all he could see was his teeth, so white, so blindingly beautiful, and to those teeth, which were the closest thing in the room to God, he whispered, “I wasn’t Zusya.” The doctor didn’t understand. He had to say it again, pushing the words hard out of his mouth. Finally, he was heard. “Of course not,” the doctor said, soothingly, freeing himself from his patient’s weak grip and gently patting the hand speared through with the I.V. tube. “You were Professor Brodman, and you’re still him.”

If they hadn’t cut his stomach muscles, he might have laughed. What could such a person know of regret? Probably he didn’t have children yet. By the look of him, not even a wife. Everything was before him. Soon he’d go for his coffee, filled with the promise of the day. And, just that morning, he’d brought a dead man back to life! What could he know of a life misspent? Yes, Brodman had been Brodman and was still Brodman, and yet he had failed to be Brodman, just as Rabbi Zusya had failed to be the man he should have been. He had learned the tale as a boy: How after the rebbe from Hanipol had died he stood awaiting God’s judgment, ashamed that he had not been Moses or Abraham. But when God appeared at last, He asked only, “Why weren’t you Zusya?” The story ended there, but Brodman had dreamed the rest: how God concealed Himself again and Zusya, all alone, whispered, “Because I was a Jew, and there was no room left to be anything else, not even Zusya.”

The washed morning light filed through the hospital window, and a pigeon flapped loose from the sill. The glass was frosted to hide the brick wall across the way, and what he could see of the bird was only a changing form moving upward. But he heard the scramble of wings in his thoughts as a kind of punctuation, like a comma striking the white page. It had been years since his mind was so clear or focussed. Death had scoured it of the extraneous. His thoughts were of a different quality now, and bore sharply through. He had the feeling that at last he had got to the bottom of everything. He wanted to tell Mira. But where was Mira? All through the long days of illness she had sat in a chair at his bedside, leaving only for a few hours each night to sleep. In that instant, Brodman understood that his grandson had been born while he was dead. He wanted to know: had they named the boy after him?

He’d retired from teaching years ago, and was said to be writing the masterwork that would synthesize a lifetime of scholarship. But no one had seen the pages, and rumors circulated around the department. As far back as he could remember, he had known the answers—his life had floated on a great ocean of understanding, and he’d had only to dip his cup. He had not noticed the slow evaporation of that ocean until it was too late. He had ceased to understand. He had not understood for years. Every day he sat at his desk in the cramped back room of the apartment filled with tribal art that he and Mira had bought cheaply forty years ago on a trip to New Mexico. For years he’d sat, but nothing had come. He’d even thought of writing his memoirs, but got only as far as filling a notebook with the names of people he’d once known. When his old students came by, he sat under the primitive masks and held forth on the predicament of the Jewish historian. The Jews had finished writing history long ago, he said. When the rabbis closed the canon of the Bible, it was because they felt they had more than enough history. Two thousand years ago the door was shut on sacred history, the only kind a Jew had any use for. Then came the zealotry and the messianism, the savagery of the Romans, the river of blood, the fire, the destruction, and, finally, exile. From then on, the Jews decided to live outside history. History was what happened to other people while the Jews were waiting for the Messiah to come. In the meantime, the rabbis busied themselves with Jewish memory only, and for two millennia that memory had sustained an entire people. So who was he—who were any of them—to rock the boat?

Having heard it all before, his students came by less and less. Ruthie could bear to stay for only fifteen minutes. His older daughter had long ago been lost to him. Occasionally, she took a break from throwing herself in front of Israeli bulldozers in the West Bank to call home. But if he picked up, instead of Mira, she hung up and went back to the Palestinians. For a moment, he would hear her breathing. “Carol?” But he was answered by the dial tone. What had he ever done to her? He had not been a good father. But had he been so terrible? Absorbed in his academic life, he had left the girls in Mira’s hands. Had there been something beneath that choice? What interest they might have had in him waned. At night, when Mira braided their coppery hair before bed, the delicate lacework of their days had come spooling out, the triumphs and the disappointments. He was neither expected nor wanted during this ritual, so he kept to himself in the back room, converted into a study after Carol was born. But the sense of being shut out, powerless and irrelevant, stoked his fury. Later, he always regretted the things he said.

And yet his daughters hadn’t been cowed by him. They had done what they wanted to do. His own children had not suffered under the same filial yoke as he. An only child, Brodman had no more been able to betray his parents than kick them in the face. Their lives had rested on his back like a house of cards. His father had arrived at Ellis Island as a scholar of ancient languages, and come out the other end as a Hebrew teacher. His mother had become a housecleaner for well-to-do Jews in the Bronx. When Brodman was born, she’d stopped working, but in her mind she went on navigating rooms, staircases, corners, and corridors. In his early years, she would get lost traversing those spaces. Can a child understand that his mother is losing herself? Brodman had not understood. After she was taken away, he was alone with his father. With grim piety and meticulousness, his father had schooled him in what was expected. Every day at dawn, Brodman had watched him bind himself for prayer in the cold light from the east. When he left the house for work he remained stooped, like the curve he’d taught Brodman to draw for the Hebrew script. Never had Brodman loved his father more than in those moments, though later he wondered whether what he had taken for love was partly pity, mingled with the desire to protect his father from further pain.

After three months, they brought his mother home, and propped her on pillows with a view of the water stain on the ceiling. The pale-blue skin was stretched taut over her ankles and shone. Brodman cooked for her and fed her, and then studied at the table under the flypaper, listening for her dry coughs. When his father came home, he put the food on the table for him. Afterward, he mopped the oilcloth clean and took down the Hebrew books with their crumbling leather spines. His father’s lips moved soundlessly, his broad-nailed finger searching out the passage. Abraham bound Isaac once so that Isaac would go on binding himself forever. Each night before bed, Brodman checked his bindings, the way a man double-checks the doors and windows of his house. When he left the apartment, he locked the door quietly behind him, and on his back he carried his mother, with her blue ankles, and his stooped father, and their parents, too, dead in a trench at the edge of a pine forest.

But not his daughters. Had they sensed the price he’d paid, and learned from him after all—he with his old books, stunted by duty? All through their childhood, his father’s sepia face had looked miserably down on them from the living-room wall. But they were going to have none of it. They had turned and walked briskly away in the opposite direction. They’d thought nothing of rejecting what he cherished. They had not revered him. From Carol he had received only disdain, and from Ruthie indifference. He had been enraged at them for it, but at bottom he’d envied how they stood up for themselves. Only when it was too late did he come to understand that they were no happier than he was, and no more free. At nineteen, Carol had been hospitalized. When he went to her, she was strapped to the bed in a straitjacket. He had underestimated her condition, and taken her a book of stories by Agnon. Embarrassed, he left it clumsily on the table. She looked up at the ceiling, as his mother had once looked up.

Brodman had not suffered such softness of the brain. The gene for it—if that’s what it was—had passed over him. Or he had hardened his mind against it. His illness was of the flesh, and could be cut away. Now it was in a lab jar somewhere, after his difficult Cesarean, and his grandson was in an incubator, four weeks premature. No, he was not confused, only overwhelmed by the symmetry. Together they convalesced, Brodman on the eleventh floor and his grandson on the sixth. Brodman from death and his grandson from life. Mira hurried between them like a congressional aide. Visitors came and went. For the baby, they brought plush toys and tiny onesies of Egyptian cotton. For Brodman, strained fruit and books that he lacked the concentration to read.

At last, on the day the baby was to be released from the hospital, Brodman was well enough to be brought to him. Early in the morning, the Russian nurse came to give him a sponge bath. “Now we wash to meet grandson!” she sang, going about it with a firm hand. Looking down, he discovered that he no longer had a navel. The mark of his birth had been replaced by an ugly red welt, four inches across. What was he to make of this? The Russian rolled him down the corridor in a wheelchair. Through open doors, he saw the bruised shins and clawed feet of the nearly dead poking from the blankets.

But when he arrived the room was already filled to capacity with people who had claims on the child—his daughter, her girlfriend, the homosexual who had contributed the sperm, the homosexual’s boyfriend. For more than an hour, Brodman waited his turn. From the wheelchair it was impossible even to catch a glimpse of the baby, who was completely walled in by his progenitors. Furious, Brodman wheeled himself out, rode the elevator in the wrong direction, toured the dialysis center, and followed signs to the meditation courtyard, where he took out his anger on a squat and mossy Buddha. When no one came for him, he decided to go back to pick a fight with his daughter.

By the time he returned, the room had emptied out. Mira placed the sleeping baby in his arms, wrapped in white. He held his breath, staring at the whorls of the child’s perfect ear, luminescent, as if painted by Fra Filippo Lippi. Afraid of dropping him, Brodman tried to shift the bundle in his arms, but the baby started and opened his sticky, lashless eyes. Brodman felt something being tugged painfully from his decrepit body. He held the boy against his chest and would not let go.

That night he lay in his bed on the eleventh floor, too agitated to sleep. His grandson was at home in his crib now, swaddled in soft things and dreaming under a lightly spinning mobile. Good, sleep, bubbeleh. All is still quiet in your world, nothing is yet upon you. No one wishes to ask your opinion about anything. Not that the child was protected from opinions. They swirled around him. Ruthie had asked Mira to buy him a Moses basket. “What does she want with such a basket?” Brodman said. Realizing that she’d steered wrong, Mira wrestled the basket back into the tissue paper. But he had already sunk in his teeth. “How long must we go on reënacting this little charade?” he asked. “We’re not slaves in Egypt anymore. What’s more, we were never slaves in Egypt.”

“You’re being ridiculous,” Mira said, pushing the basket back into the Saks bag and kicking it under her chair. Brodman knew it and didn’t care. He wouldn’t give up. “A Moses basket? Why, Mira? Explain it to me.”

No, he couldn’t sleep. Somewhere in the wide world there must be children who were born and raised without precedent—the idea of it sent a shiver of awe down his spine. Who might he have been, had it been given to him to choose? But his chance had passed. He had allowed himself to be crushed by duty. He had failed to fully become himself, had instead given in to ancient pressures. And now he saw how foolish it had all been, what a waste! Burned brilliant by fever, he had understood everything. The arguments of the dead had been laid out for him, the irreducible proofs of those who knew from the other side. He had died and been called back so that he might instruct the child, and set him on a different path.

In the morning, Mira arrived with buttered rolls sweating in a Ziploc bag. He ate his breakfast and listened to her stories of the child’s victorious homecoming, of his powerful pissing and great thirst. Brodman, too, was pissing and drinking volumes, and when the doctor came by on his rounds he joked with Mira that her holiday was almost over. Tomorrow or the next day they would be sending Brodman home. Home—Brodman suddenly remembered it. The endless hours in the dark back room, trying to ignite a broken fuse. Day after day, year after year, the blank legal pad had reproached him with its fine lines. All that was finished now. He hadn’t been brought back to life for the sake of absurdity.

Too small by half, the child had not been circumcised at eight days. In the hospital, they had fattened him like Hansel, and at home he continued to enlarge himself. Now the news came that the doctor had given the all-clear. The event would be held in Ruthie’s apartment. Bagels and lox would be served. A female mohel who broke with custom to allow for a topical anesthetic had been found in Riverdale. All of this Brodman overheard from the bedroom. When Mira came in to tell him the news, he pretended to be asleep. He was too tired to explain to her the nature of his revelations. The incandescence of his fever had dimmed. The days were clotted with boredom now. Had he not once been a man of action? He had always thought of himself as such, but what proof did he have? The evidence—a meagre output of books, themselves commentaries on commentaries on other books—suggested otherwise. Bolstered by foam pillows, he looked up at the thin patch of sky between buildings. Carol was a person of action. Carol had lost her mind and become a person of action. A person who stood up to tanks and bulldozers, who fought for the things she believed in. But he, her father, had kept his mind, and closed himself up in it as a man closes himself up in a faultless argument.

He had shed twenty pounds during his ordeal, and his clothes no longer fit him. Busy with catering and the folding chairs, Mira had failed to think of this until two hours before the bris. Brodman shouted, though it still hurt to shout, and threatened to go in his stained robe. Mira, who for fifty years had met his temper with implacable calm, continued to field phone calls while packing up platters. Then she left the apartment without a word. Brodman heard the door close, and stoked his rage with the thought that she had left without him. He was about to pick up the phone to scream at Ruthie when Mira returned with a maroon silk shirt and brown pants from the upstairs neighbor, whose wife she sometimes had coffee with. Disgusted, Brodman tossed the silk shirt onto the floor and roared. But soon the anger went out of him like the heat in a house with old windows, leaving only helplessness and despair. Twenty minutes later, he was standing downstairs, in ballooning silk sleeves, while the doorman hailed a cab.

It was winter now. The taxi made its way through the gray streets of the city where Brodman had lived all his life. Buildings smeared past the fogged window. Mira had nothing to say to him. In the lobby of Ruthie’s place, he stood waiting in borrowed clothes, surrounded by Mira’s plastic bags. She had ridden up in the elevator to get help. Brodman thought of turning to go. He pictured himself making his way home through the chilly streets.

Seventeen years ago, after his father died, he had been sideswiped by a debilitating depression. It was a black period, and at the bottom of it he had thought seriously of taking his life. Only after his father was gone did Brodman discover what his powerful presence had obscured. An ambivalence, like a fault line, that now threatened to topple everything that had been built over it. No, more than ambivalence. An objection. Not to his father, whom he had loved. But to what his father had asked of him, just as it had been asked of his father, and his father before that, and back and back through the chain of relentless begetting. No, he was not angry! he bellowed in the therapist’s office. “I simply object to the burden!”

“Of what?” she asked, pen poised, waiting to copy it down in his file.

After a month, the insomnia and the migraines stopped, and he began slowly to recognize himself again. For months afterward, he was shaken every time he remembered how close he had come to giving up. Inhaling the smell of fresh horseshit in Central Park, seeing the skyscrapers loom up above the tree line, he felt overcome with gratitude. The museums along Fifth Avenue, the yellow taxis in sunlight, music—these things made his knees weak, as if he had just safely crawled back from a ledge. Finding himself in front of Carnegie Hall, or one of the dazzled theatres on Broadway right as the audience spilled out, still abroad in another world, Brodman felt embraced by life. The bitter taste of his objection had passed. But some part of him had gone with it. He had been damaged by the dissent, and could never again be what he had been. It must have been then that it began: the slow drain of understanding that dried up his once fertile mind.

In the dingy lobby of his daughter’s building, leaning on his hospital-issued cane, he watched the numbers above the elevator light up in descending order. The doors parted to reveal the smiling face of the sperm donor. “Grandpa!” he called sonorously, and pumped Brodman’s hand before sweeping up the shopping bags. In the close elevator, Brodman began to sweat. He breathed through his mouth so as to avoid inhaling the man’s overripe cologne. The elevator rumbled up through the floors, carrying all the male relatives the poor child had in the world. Brodman winced, trying to shut out an image of the man beside him diddling with himself to fill a paper cup.

The apartment was already crowded with people. One of Ruthie’s oldest friends accosted Brodman and kissed him dryly on the cheek. “It’s good to see you home again. You gave everyone a scare,” she said, loudly, as if his illness had also deafened him. Brodman grunted, and made his way to the window. He wrenched it open and inhaled the cold air. But when he turned back to the overfilled apartment he was lightheaded. Across the room, Mira was busy coaxing tea from a large samovar for the mohelet from Riverdale. This woman, with her crocheted kippa the size of a dinner plate, had arrived in a prepaid sedan to remove his grandson’s foreskin as a mark of God’s covenant. To cut away his flesh, so that the child’s soul should not be cut off forever from his people.

Brodman felt unsteady on his feet. He pushed his way through the kitchen, past the tubs of cream cheese under plastic wrap, and thumped down the dark corridor with the metal cane. He wanted only to lie down in Ruthie’s bedroom and close his eyes. But when he opened the door he found the bed occupied by a mountain of coats and scarves. Hot tears sprang to his eyes. He felt a howl building in his lungs, the howl of a man who has been shut out by grace. But what he heard instead was a soft gurgle. He spun around and saw the reed basket in the corner, tucked next to a rocking chair. The baby opened his tiny mouth. For a moment it seemed he might cry out, or even speak. But instead he lifted a tiny mottled fist and tried to shove it inside. Brodman moved toward him, filled with feeling. Sensing a change in his world of light and shadow, the baby turned. Wide-eyed, he regarded his grandfather with a questioning look. Down the hall, they were preparing the yoke and the blade. How could he help the boy now?

The service door led to the fire stairs. Abandoning the cane, Brodman clutched the bannister and dragged himself up two flights. His stomach muscles ached. Three times he had to put the basket down to catch his breath. At last they reached the top, and Brodman pushed the metal bar of the door that released them to the roof.

Birds exploded from the ledge, soaring skyward. Below, the city spread out in all directions. From here it appeared quiet, almost still. To the west, he saw the great barges on the Hudson, the cliffs of faraway New Jersey. Heaving, he set the basket down on the tar paper. The baby squirmed in the cold; his eyes blinked with wonder. Brodman trembled with love for him. His beautiful features were wholly unfamiliar, loyal to no one. A child still without measure, equal only to himself. Perhaps he would turn out not to resemble any of them.

They would already have discovered him missing below. Alarms would be ringing, the apartment in chaos. Brodman felt the wind knife through the silk shirt. He had no plan. If he had hoped for some guidance, there was none to be found here. The leaden sky had sealed the heavens up. Stooping with difficulty, he lifted the baby out of the basket. His tiny head flopped back, but Brodman caught it and cradled it tenderly in the crook of his arm. He rocked and swayed gently, just as his father had in the early morning, after he had wrapped the black straps around his arm and head. If he was weeping, he did not know it. He stroked the baby’s soft cheek with his finger. The boy’s gray eyes seemed to look on him with patience. But Brodman could not say what it was that he was meant to tell the child. Restored to life, he could no longer parse the infinite wisdom of the dead. ♦

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